Photo Of The Moment: Khaled Meshaal’s Brief Return

﻿ AP Photo – Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal (C) walks past members of the media as he attends his father’s funeral in Amman. Meshaal was allowed back into Jordan for first time since 1999 for the funeral.

READ “KILL KHALID” NOW!!!!! As a jewish american who wants nothing more than to see an independent palestinian state before I die,it’s a harrowing and spellbinding tale of foolishness that makes that dream seem many lifetimes away.What a shame.

@chris: i’m not convinced that an “independent” palestinian state is a viable option anymore.

@maha: hmm, honestly, not sure if i’m on board with e-books. my online attention span is accustomed to quick internet reading. don’t know if i have the patience to sit down and read from a screen for hours. gotta get me a kindle or something…

WARNING: This is addressed to Maha who is offering a PDF copy of my book – Kill Khalid – and the respondents to this blog seeking to take up her offer.

Please be warned that if you proceed to in peddling this stolen PDF you are breaching copyright and making yourself liable for legal action – especially Maha, who will be the prime target, because it is he/she who had identified him/herself as the recipient of stolen property who, in turn, is inducing others to breach my copyright.

Kill Khalid required great effort on my part. Please think about this – as another respondent to blackiris said, the cost of printing 500 pages and replacing your ink cartridge would be the same
as the purchase price of the book … and it can be purchased from and delivered to anywhere in the world by amazon.com.

Please stay within the law and please respect my intellectual property rights –
buy the book.

Thank you to those who have said they now will not take up Maha’s offer of a boot-legged PDF of my book Kill Khalid. It is greatly appreciated that you all are so willing to respect my copyright.

Maha, if you have anything to say to me – something in the vein of an undertaking that you have destroyed your copy of the PDF; or perhaps to reveal to me something of how you acquired it, so that I can shut down what appears to be a leak from one of the four publishing houses that has published Kill Khalid in different countries around the world – I’d appreciate hearing from you. My email is: mcgeough@mcgeough.org.

But I still can’t sell PDFs because people simply copy them and share them around and copyright is breached because the book, which cost me a considerable amount of time and money to write, is being distributed free.

I think Paul deserves an apology. While many of us never wanted to intentionally infringe on Paul’s rights, it is nevertheless a serious breach of his IP rights. Naseem, I would appreciate it if you delete my earlier post, as I do not want a copy. Speaking of which, book shopping in this country is such a hassle.

Paul,
Can you tell us little bit about yourself? How did you become who you are now? any resume online?

Scholars and Authors go to school by consuming public money and then to universities with public funding or scholarships. Once they build their accumulated knowledge they start thinking of a way to make money and a way to control the accessibility to the accumulated knowledge which was sponsored by public money. They do so only to make more money.

On the other side, shame on those who requested a PDF copy and can afford buying the book.

First, I’m a story-teller. Virtually all of my work as a foreign correspondent had been on-the-ground reporting, telling the stories of people in Gaza and the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, The Balkans, the Republic of Zaire, East Timor an Northern Ireland.

My first assignment was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since then I have travelled the globe – with a respite for several years when I was appointed editor of the newspaper for which I work – The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia).

My view of covering world affairs is that journalists fall into two neat categories. Some prefer to stay in capital cities, reporting and analysing policy at the decision-makers’ level, drilling ‘down’ into the issues if you like; others prefer to be on the ground, among the people affected by those decisions and drilling ‘up’ into the policy issues. I’m in the latter group, because it is more challenging, rewarding and real. It is more difficult to rationalise issues when you are confronted with the consequence and it is more rewarding as a writer to have exotic cultural, social and geographic backdrops as the canvas on which to tell a story. Also, there is an opportunity to inform your readers about things, people and their ways that the reader does not necessarily know, understand or appreciate – so it is about bringing new and useful information to public discourse.

I was in the streets of Manhattan on 9/11 and since then I have reported continuously on its aftermath – on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq for the two wars of invasion and their harrowing outcomes. I’m based in Australia, but I spend about half of each year on assignment, still following the post-9/11 story and the other crisis issues that like it or not, tend to be joined to it.

As for all that publicly-funded education and locked-up knowledge, I don’t think it applies in my case.

I went to university only briefly and have done all my study and learning on the road. All of my reporting, papers and speeches are available on open-souce websites (try Google) with the exception of my several books (Manhattan to Baghdad; In Baghdad; Mission Impossible; and Kill Khalid).

The books are excluded for the simple reason, that I have had to break from my regular employment to write them (Kill Khalid took the best part of 18 months to write and research) and they take a significnt portion of my personal resources. If all books were free, I think you’d find that there would be very few books of the kind you might like to read – a work lke Kill Khalid required on-the-ground research in six countries (think travel/accommodation/communications/translation costs) and months chained to a desk at my home writing the book.

I was born in Ireland (in the Republic of), but migrated to Australia with my family as an 11-year-old. I have been a journalist for 34 years. Anything else needed here?